With over 40 percent
of the ballots counted, the outcome of Russia's 2016 Parliamentary
elections is completely clear: President Vladimir Putin came out on
top of this election, with his party of power, United Russia, looking
to take an overwhelming majority in the new State Duma assembly.

Half of the 450-seat
State Duma is elected through party lists. United Russia has so far
claimed 52 percent of that contest. Another 225 seats in the Duma are
awarded in a single-constituency system, which means a district
is represented by a single winner-takes-all candidate. When the dust
settles, it is estimated that United Russia could walk away with far more than 300 seats.

A Crushing Victory

According to
official results, the closest contest in the 2016 election was for
second place. Russia's Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), a nationalist
outfit, has a very tight lead over the Communist Party for second
place with 14.23 percent of the vote. The Communist Party has taken 14.19
percent. The party in fourth, A Just Russia, will enter
parliament with around 6.3 percent of the vote.

LDPR, the Communist Party
and A Just Russia are all known to be part of the so-called “systemic
opposition,” a term denoting their official sanction by the regime.
These parties are loyal to the Kremlin on all major political issues,
such as the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent armed
conflict in eastern Ukraine. Combined with United Russia, these four
parties will take around 445 of the Duma's 450 seats. There is a huge doubt that there would be an independent voice to occupy at least one of the left 5 seats.

“It was not
important for the Kremlin if United Russia ended up with 40, 50, or
even 60 percent of the vote,” says Abbas Gallyamov, a political
analyst.

But for the liberal
opposition, the 2016 elections were a make-or-break moment, and the
final tally was nothing short of a disaster for them. The traditional
mainstream liberal party, Yabloko, failed to pass the necessary 5-percent threshold to win seats in the Duma. The other opposition
party, PARNAS, led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, also
failed to pass the mark.

PARNAS also failed
to get a single deputy elected in the single-constituency districts,
but in the hours after polls closed there is still hope that Yabloko
can win a seat.

A Clean Campaign

The advent of the
single-constituency district contests were new to the 2016 election.
In 2011, all 450 deputies were elected through party lists, and in
this format United Russia barely won a simple majority of 226 seats.
The United Russia project was teetering on failure — something the Kremlin could not afford.

That election was not won cleanly. According to thousands of witness
testimonies and independent analyses of electoral data, the 2011
election was severely rigged — possibly saving United Russia from
failure in that election. But it came at a cost, the tampering
sparked street protests in Moscow and other major cities. Known as
the Bolotnaya movement, the rallies were the largest seen in Moscow
since the 1990s.

Since 2011, the
regime has introduced single-constituency
districts. In the Kremlin's mind, this was a new safety mechanism. No
matter what, United Russia would win a majority in this system.

“They were going
to win it either way,” says Gallyamov. “At the same time, the
Kremlin succeeded in persuading voters that this election would be
honest and open. And this was a big victory.”

No major violations
were spotted — though evidence of vote tampering was readily
available — and there was no real need for rigging. Russian Central
Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova, who staked her career on a
clean election, declared the 2016 election to be completely legitimate.

Shocking Turnout

This election was
about voter turnout from the very start: The fewer voters turn out
to the polls, the fewer votes cast for opposition parties and
candidates. And in major urban centers like Moscow and St.
Petersburg, voter turnout was the lowest seen in a decade. The
overall turnout was around 40 percent of the national electorate —
the lowest participation in a Russian parliamentary election in the
country's post-Soviet history.

Five years ago, when
Moscow became the center of a protest movement against a rigged
election, voter turnout was about 50 percent. In Moscow on Sunday,
just 30 percent of city residents turned up to vote. The
situation was worse in St. Petersburg, where only 16 percent of the
city's residents had voted by 5 p.m. In 2011, almost 40 percent had
voted by 6 p.m.

In Russia, big
cities feed opposition with votes and political force. But this time,
they just abstained. “Think of it like a strike," says sociologist Ella
Paneyakh.

And so, the
Kremlin's bet on lower voter turnout proved to be the correct one,
says Alexander Kynev, a political analyst. The low turnout was
inevitable, first of all because the election was moved from December
to early autumn. Second, because there were agreements between major
parties not to touch sensitive issues in the lead up to the election.

“It was a rigged
game,” Kynev says. For the electorate, it was simply dull.

Furthermore, the
opposition parties didn't have the resources to campaign in the
regions, Kynev says. “Their only chances were in the big cities and
they blew it.”

“I want to say
that I am sorry,” said Yabloko leader Lev Schlosberg on a TV RAIN
talk show after the election. “We couldn't get through this iron
curtain to our voters,” said Schlosberg, who is also editor-in
chief-of the Pskovskaya Guberniya newspaper, which was the first
outlet to report on Russian losses in the war with Ukraine.

“We failed to
engage our voters in discussion. They don't believe in elections
anymore, and they stayed home. This is our fault, and our
responsibility.”